The Natural: Farewell, Mickey Rooney

James Brown may well have been the Hardest Working Man in Show Business (I saw him strut, shout, and sweat through a ninety-minute show in the seventies, when his onstage entourage was more numerous than the audience), but that’s because he came into the spotlight decades after Mickey Rooney did. The difference was that, for Brown, the greatest of singers, the show was his business. Rooney was different: he was, proverbially, born in a trunk as the child of vaudevillians, brought up onstage, pushed by a stage mother, learning shtick as second nature—but Rooney was also a real movie star, whom the camera loved. To glance at him onscreen was to wonder what he was thinking, what he was feeling, what he’d do next—above all, to have the sense that he was running on bigger, wilder, stranger currents. And the less he did onscreen, the greater and more irresistible the wonder.

Rooney may not have needed to do anything, but he learned to do everything, to throw the kitchen sink at the camera. In musical comedy, he had a furious, nearly mask-like repertory of energized intentions. His live-wire expressiveness spoke of the can-do, will-do spirit that may have encouraged Depression-weary audiences with a dose of practical optimism, but the enforced razzle-dazzle showed only one side of his persona (and perhaps warped his personality). Rooney, in his more matter-of-fact (if less heralded) performances, holds the screen with a seemingly effortless intensity.

He was perhaps the most popular actor in America in the late thirties and early forties, starring alongside Judy Garland in the famous round of “let’s-put-on-a-show” musicals for M-G-M that featured Busby Berkeley’s artistry. Rooney did his own series of substantial dramas (including “The Human Comedy” and “National Velvet”), but the Roonaissance took an altogether different form: he became a stealth wizard of low-rent film noir. (I have a special fondness for a couple that I saw a long time ago: “The Strip,” where his drummer-boy character from musicals took on grimmer tones; and Don Siegel’s “Baby Face Nelson.”) And the sad round of this morning’s obituary reading made me aware of a fascinating TV movie, “The Comedian,” directed by John Frankenheimer, in which the frenetic and overheated side of Rooney’s screen personality was yoked to monstrosity.

He became a character actor, and a superb one. Somehow, Blake Edwards, in a uniquely bad directorial decision, got Rooney into one of the most embarrassing roles of all time, as an absurdly stereotyped Japanese man, in the greatly overrated “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Otto Preminger recruited him to play an easy-living Mob kingpin, with a brassy cool, in “Skidoo.” But the proof of the pudding was his seemingly never-ending presence on television in the sixties and seventies. Like any real star, his greatest role was always himself; no matter how extreme or how contained his performance, he was always bigger than any role he took.